


said the spider to the fly

by emiparade



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, gluskin lives, takes place both during and after the game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-03 05:32:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2839826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emiparade/pseuds/emiparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waylon's experiences at Mount Massive Asylum change him irreparably. He is not the man who took the contract with Murkoff, nor is he the man who woke up on the Groom's operating table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I got in way too deep with Whistleblower way too quick. I will add more tags as they apply and fix my godawful summary. The first chapter takes place during the game's events but the rest will be post-Mount Massive.

Waylon Park wasn't a brave man.  
  
He could be brave for other people, he knows this—Lisa and her admonishing smiles make him brave, make him better than he actually is.  
  
Or at least she used to. Now his last saving grace is his boys.  
  
But there is no one for him to be better for in this hell on Earth and he more of a coward than ever because of it.

There is no greater cause for him to cling to, even as a man he passes finger-painting with blood reassures him that is he doing _His_ work.  
  
He sends that email because he is empty and wants to scrape some worth into all he is, gorge himself on self-righteousness and heroics until he becomes the man Lisa wants and deserves. The man he wants to be.  
  
He tries to turn his gaze away from the self-serving aspect of his sending that email—safe behind firewalls and proxies and an air of ineptitude—even though his presence in The Engine room is overwhelming evidence he cannot completely ignore.  
  
There, in the Engine room, right in front of his eyes, was one of the patients most people would tell themselves they were trying to save by sending out that email and he was screaming at him through the class and everything he was saying was absolutely true.  
  
He could stop all this from his seat, compromise the system before anyone could stop him to the point it couldn't be salvaged for use, at least for a couple days. Enough time for his email's consequences to ripple, enough time that the patients here might be saved before they could be subjected to the repaired engine. He doesn’t know what it does, but he’s caught glimpses of the patients afterwards, snippets of conversation in the cafeteria to know it’s not doing anyone any good. He could finish it here, complete his show of heroics, _save people_.  
  
That he doesn't do any of that, that he just sits meekly as the code is repaired, is evidence enough that he isn’t the man he hoped sending that email would make him. He is nothing more of a coward, and he knows it.  
  
When the patient—Eddie Gluskin, the pixelated text helpfully supplied—popped up on the monitor, violated and blistering, something seized his heart and squeezed.  
  
But that didn't stop him from leaving.  
  
His cowardice, his inability for bravery unless it was on his own terms, did not save him just as it did not save Eddie Gluskin. When he returns to the laptop, Jeremy Blaire is waiting for him with a security team.  
  
Waylon Park had this innate desire for his existence to mean something here, extend beyond the reach of himself—even if the reality was that the only existence he could carve out for himself was the space of a couch with blankets and pillows tucked away by the time the kids woke up.  
  
Instead it was snuffed out by a fist cracking across his face.  
  
When he woke up, when everything went straight to shit, he felt as though he belonged here.  
  
It wasn't that he felt some level of kinship with the other patients and doctors he happened across—the way his breath labored and pitched by the sheer sight of them showed that well enough. His refusal to take the knife only cemented it in his heart.  
  
Instead his being here felt somehow just, the culmination of everything he didn't do. Maybe if he had been a better husband, he wouldn't have felt the need to get away, to take this contract that left him living four hours across the state in company-ordered apartments on site.  
  
Maybe if he hadn’t been such a sad sack of shit and sent that email sooner, maybe if he had been smarter about it, maybe if he had just—  
  
been anyone other than Waylon Park.  
  
But now, _now_ he felt as if he could have done everything different if he was then as he is now.  
  
It was now, surrounded by death, that he never felt more alive.  
  
He didn't think he had any fight left in him against the current of the world—he had just cowered in the corner when Blaire confronted him—but here he was, struggling tooth and nail just to get back to the things he would've thought he had lost most feeling for.

He wanted to get back to marriage counseling, back to his debts. Hell, he even missed that rickety old couch he slept on.  
  
The problems him and Lisa had been having were nothing compared to him making it through this. If he could do this, he could fix everything, _he would fix everything_.  
  
There are moments where Lisa is no longer enough, the sheer wrongness pouring down his throat and up his sinuses, choking his senses. He knows it would be simple to take the easy way out—eyes catching on every sharp piece of material he happens across—it would protect him from the would-be's of this place that he knew promised so so _so_ much worth than death.  
  
In these moments, intermittent between bouts of perseverance, that he closes his eyes and thinks of his boys. He claws his way through grime and fire and carnage, through air ducts and walls and plastic-wrapped corridors.  
  
He keeps his mind focused forward on that single horizon of home, even as it feels as if he'll taint them somehow bringing their memory into this place. Every close call brings him closer to a taste of immortality, and he dares to think he might survive.  
  
With this mindset he stumbles into The Groom's chambers.  
  
He doesn't think much of the Groom at first. He's hardened against the threat of what is to come, against the leers and promises to "make him purr". The smiling face in the door makes the same promises, the promises of companionship at a much bigger price than Waylon was willing to pay, if you were to believe the man—not three, just the one—upstairs. He doesn’t pay him much mind beyond his presence as a threat. He has almost religiously committed himself to non-interaction with the people here, as if just opening his mouth will let their sickness in and all his struggle will have been for nothing.  
  
It almost amazes Waylon how easy it is to realign his perception. He can't even remember what he used to see when he entered a room but now all he sees are open air vents, gaps in the walls, lockers to hide in, desks to duck under. _Think as you move, plot the layout, don't get caught in a dead end_. It was almost a mantra.  
  
It is this mantra that leads him to leap across the expanse of the elevator shaft and try to hold on even as the ladder gives away under his feet and hands.  
  
At first it's all just searing pain radiating up his calf, drowning out the voice from above. He yanks out the stake when the elevator thunders to life and it's all he can do to roll out into the next floor.  
  
Then the reality sets in and he wishes it was just all pain. He climbs to his feet, staggers forward and  
  
how is he supposed to run like this  
  
 _how is he supposed to escape like this?_  
  
His previous rhythm—one he would never call easy but perhaps he could call it almost reassuring in its repetition—is irreparably dashed. His thoughts are jumbled and running together and he is in a dead end before he knows it.  
  
He throws himself into a locker, eyes squeezing shut and hands clamping over his mouth in an attempt to stay quiet when he knows, _he knows_ that the Groom knows there is nowhere else he could be.  
  
When his hiding place is locked shut he is reminded of The Cook throwing him into the crematorium and wonders if that would not have been preferable to this.  
  
He can't decide before the locker is being tipped backwards and he’s unable to brace himself in time.  
  
His skull bounces off the metal back with sickening clarity and then there is nothing at all.  
  
\---  
  
Waking up is an uphill battle, an unnatural sleepiness clinging to his eyelids.

It would be so much easier to fade back into unconsciousness. Being here hurts. His head was pounding, leg burning. Buzz saw-inflicted cuts stinging along his midsection and forearms. His left pinky nail is raised thirty degrees from the root, pried free by a rushed grab for a vent. He is lying on his arm and it prickles in sleep. The pain is the only thing clear to him.   
  
He's not so out of his mind that he voices the groan reverberating in the back of his throat, pressing the side of his forehead to surface he's laid out on, as if the cold of the metal could radiate through him and numb his wounds. That small movement was all he could bring himself to do, limbs limp where they lay. He wonders if this is all just from his head injury or if he was dosed with something.  
  
It takes him longer than it should have to realize that there is screaming and he wonders if he will ever be roused from slumber again to comfort his sons awake from their nightmares. He finally manages to open his eyes—lashes pulling at dried grime—to see a knife disappearing between a man's legs.  
  
The Groom is talking, but all Waylon’s attention is on the man convulsing, blood pulling between his thighs as his screams give way to gurgles.  
  
"Love isn't for everyone."  
  
It is then, starring at the frayed edges of tissue around a carved out hole where his genitals used to be, that Waylon loses to the nausea he's been fighting since that doctor first licked his ear.  
  
He's too dazed to even hurl properly, only managing to tilt his head further towards the metal beneath him, body trembling as bile forces its way out in sad little huffs. It's all over the arm splayed out in front of him, soaking into the fabric of his jumpsuit and he can't even gather the strength to raise his face out of it.  
  
He tried to not let this place get the best of him, but here he was, hyperventilating into his own puke, tears stinging in his eyes.  
  
"Darling, you're awake!" He would have jumped at the hand on his face, but all he could muster was a glance upwards to its owner. The Groom. "You're not ready yet, though. I know it's awfully hard to restrain yourself before the ceremony, but waiting makes it more special for both of us."  
  
“Oh, but look at you, you’re a mess! Let me take care of you.” He must have definitely been dosed with something. Or else he was dying. Either way, he couldn't even begin to resist when that hand propped his head up and something wiped from his jaw up over his lips. He whimpered as it pressed into his mouth, dragging over his lower teeth and over his tongue. There was an underlying taste of copper that made him suspicious as to where the rag had been before this.  
  
His throat constricts with a weak attempt at a gag, but his body has all but given up. His gaze is failing, eyelids drooping. His fight against unconsciousness is a futile one, and when he slips back under it is to the murmuring of the Groom and the fabric of his gloves catching in his hair.  
  
\---  
  
He wakes up twice more, still in the same position but thankfully without his face half-submerged in his own vomit. It’s the little things. He tries to lift himself and fails, only capable of flexing his fingers against the metal surface.  
  
He retains consciousness just long enough to watch the ceremony of two more of the Groom's wives and although each is just as gruesome as the first—the moment those wide shoulders roll as he slices downwards, splitting one wife's pelvis is bound to haunt his dreams for years—he doesn't feel that same rise of nausea. He just feels tired.  
  
\----  
  
The air is cold against his skin and he doesn't know how much time has passed. It feels like days but it could just be hours, minutes. He's waking up, but it doesn't feel like he even slept.  
  
The Groom is chattering away again somewhere above him. He seems to do that a lot. Seeing is harder than it should be, shapes blurring and rolling together. His head lulls to the side, a questioning noise caught in his throat.  
  
A hand runs up his thigh and that finally gets his attention, gives him the will to blink his focus clear. It's the Groom, of course it is. He can't even bring himself to be surprised at the view of his own dick out, probably more flaccid than he had been in his entire life. Slightly more alarming is the sight of his legs strung up in a mockery of the stirrups at the gynecologist. His gaze darts up, confirming his fears that his arms are similarly bounded. This time he does groan.  
  
He should feel absolutely terrified, he should be pissing himself in fear but all he feels is exhaustion and a past regard for the times he could've ended it all. His chest starts to heave, but it is as if it’s not him gasping for breath—he feels external to himself.  
  
He feels like he has extended beyond the being of Waylon Park.  
  
"A place to grow our family."  
  
He is only half listening to the other's words, but he hears that.

He hears that and his entire being bristles. "No." His tongue feels thick in his mouth, and he repeats himself, wetting his tongue. "No." He’s not going to die listening to this shit. He wants to die in bed next to Lisa as an old man, but that’s clearly not happening, so the least he wants is not to die as one of the Groom’s fucking wives.  
  
"I know, I know," he assures Waylon, but he doesn't know at all. "You may be scared now, but think of our future, our children."  
  
"You don't," he licks his lips, tastes the remnants of bile, "you don't want our children."  
  
This seems to give the Groom pause and his hand returns to Waylon's thigh, rubbing circles with his thumb. "Darling, why would you say that? Are you cross with me?" The grip tightened, fingertips pressing into flesh. "Have I not done all of this for you?"

  
"You haven't done a single thing for me. You haven’t done a single thing for anyone other than yourself." His heart is pounding in his chest, but his words are independent of that, as level and as clear as he can muster through the lingering cloud of sleep. "There are ways to do what you want, but not with how you're doing it." His hands flex in their restraints but nothing gives. "Maybe you've been telling yourself this story about a wedding and a family, but you're not making wives to impregnate them. You're making wives to kill them."  
  
He doesn't know if the Groom's silence is a lack of words for what he is saying or if he's just deciding how best to mutilate him beyond repair. Either way, he pushes. "So just do it. Murder me. Don't say it's to make a family with me or to clip away the vulgar or any of that bullshit. Just call it what it is. I’m not one of your brides, I’m one of your victims." His voice rises as he continues and a sense of self-righteousness flows into him. It's not courage, he's not the type of person to apply such a label to himself, but it’s close and he understands what it is to be free in death.

The Groom isn't moving, the table saw is buzzing, and the lull in action is destroying him more than anything. "Do it, destroy your family, and just do it already! Kill me!" He's screaming by the end, hands rattling against the wood and eyes locked on the Groom's and—they're blue, _they're so blue_. “Just fucking kill me!”  
  
Finally he moves, and Waylon almost sobs with relief, but the movement halted even before a man comes crashing into him. His large frame falls against the table Waylon is tied to and it pushes towards the buzz saw.  
  
His eyes squeeze shut— _this isn't the end he had prepared for,_ this wasn't his last defiant fuck you to this fucking place and its products, this was just going to be an accident—but there is no searing pain from the saw tearing into his genitals but rather a jerk of momentum lost.  
  
Waylon opens his eyes and the Groom's hand is on the wood just below his right foot even as the rest of him busy bodily holding back the interloper, probably an escaped victim. He flings the table away from the saw and the force of the action must have broken the wood’s integrity in some integral way because Waylon is pulling free as the assailant rips open that patchwork vest, tearing away and peeling out of the room even as the Groom follows him.  
  
His jumpsuit is back in his hands in a matter of seconds, pulling it over his limbs haphazardly and averting his consideration from the dirtied gauze tied around his calf.  
  
He is ready to run—or shuffle quickly or whatever he could manage—when he sees it.  
  
A key lying innocently on the floor.  
  
He snatches it up, looking it over. The Groom couldn’t have just left it lying around, unless

 

unless it was what the assailant was gunning for when he ripped open the vest, and it had been dropped and forgotten in the conflict. He doesn't have long to ponder its appearance, he hears something crash off to one side and takes off in the opposite direction.  
  
He opens every locked door he sees, even ones he doesn't go through. He wants this sanctuary gone. He looks up at a ceiling of hung bodies and no, he doesn't just want it gone, he wants it burned to the ground. He wishes he had more time, he would do it himself.  
  
He doesn't see the Groom again, though there is the occasional shuffle of noise out of sight that he's not sure of he imagines or not, but he puts it out of mind as he finally finds the door out of the vocational block and towards admin.

The chapel is burning in the distance, and for the first time he feels affinity for someone else here.  
  
He wonders if that means the insidiousness this place had soaked into his being. He’s not assuaged by the feeling that, although he hadn't done anything to harm a single other person here yet, he might not be able to stop himself from fighting back if he was to be halted here, so close to freedom he could taste it.  
  
He doesn't stand much of a chance against bullets, though. Some kind of armed force had flooded the asylum since he got knocked out, and he tries not to think of all the open doors he left leading back to the Groom.

It didn't matter, he had done enough to deserve death, Waylon shouldn't linger on his guilt.  
  
There is a moment where he goes to run his hand through his hair and finds stitches along his scalp at the back of his skull, tender but apparently done with some level of finesse. He thinks of being knocked out and removed from the locker, being sewn up with the same hand that skittered along his thigh.  
  
It doesn't change anything.  
  
He stays to the shadows, facing forward even as reports of deaths ring static-cracked through the air. If it—the specter he saw when all of this started probably—is beneath the asylum, it doesn't matter to him. Nothing matters except him and the front door.  
  
Except that son of a bitch Jeremy Blaire is sitting right in the entrance. Waylon wants to grind his face into the floor, stomp down until there's nothing but cracked bone and mush, and the thought makes him shake. Jeremy Blaire is perhaps the biggest monster to come out of this place, terrifying in his sanity in a whole different way from the patients they put through the engine.  
  
Despite his convictions, his fantasies over just what he would like to do to Blaire, he hobbles towards him without the intent to harm. That doesn't mean he intends to take him up on the deal, he'd much rather leave him here to deal with the problems he helped create.  
  
But before he can just push past him, Blaire is on him—of course he is, of course this can't be easy—and there is a knife in his hand and  
  
he is ripped backwards, out of the reach of that sharp metal and Blaire's prying grip, and crashes in an ungainly heap of limbs on the ground.  
  
He raises his head and it's his Groom struggling with Blaire. The knife gets knocked away, clattering along the ground and coming to rest in front of Waylon. He grabs it.  
  
It doesn't take long, and it's not a surprise who takes the fight. Waylon was on the smaller side—which actually worked to his advantage with his forays into the ducts snaking through the asylum—but the Groom towered over the executive. Blaire had the build of a man who kicked someone when they were already down; the Groom looked like a powerhouse onto himself.  
  
Blaire pleaded through a mouthful of blood, a hand fisted in his collar, legs given out, reaching out and making all the promises in the world, but that didn't stop the Groom's fist from cracking down across his face one last time.  
  
He crumpled to the floor, and Waylon wasn't sure if he was dead or just unconscious and he couldn't care either way.  
  
Those blue eyes, stark amongst the blown blood vessels, set their sights on his quivering form.  
  
Waylon brandished that knife between them, climbing ungainly to his feet, haggard breath ringing out into the silence. What happened to the fighting, the gunfire? Did whatever it was in the basement already work its way through the armed forces? Was anyone left alive beyond the two of them?  
  
"Why are you here?" It was an accusation as much as it was a distraction.  
  
The Groom's features lightened for some reason unknowable to Waylon and he gripped the hilt harder. "There was no sanctuary there. Only a house with love becomes a home."  
  
"I'm leaving." He said it as a promise, starting to circle around the Groom.  
  
The other took a step closer, not even bothering to raise his hands or show any indication he even noticed the knife pointed at him. "You wanted me to kill you." The Groom’s expression was intense in some indiscernible way—Waylon was pretty sure it wasn't in anger, but couldn’t even begin to guess what emotion it was.  
  
"Yeah, well, I'm going to live. Sorry." The older man was close now, close enough that Waylon could just throw all of his weight forward with one thrust and end all of this, he know he could, the guy's arms were limp at his sides, he wouldn't be able to defend himself in time—  
  
He had completed the circle, his back to the doorframe and the sunlight pouring in past him, washing over the Groom's face and——  
  
He knew him.  
  
He was the man he couldn't bring himself to help back in the Engine room, there was no doubt about it even though his face was now obscured by scabbing.  
  
 _He was the man Waylon Park couldn’t bring himself to save._

  
"You can go." Waylon's voice didn't waver. "Don’t you dare follow me, but you can go."  
  
He turned and ran, going as fast as he dared to with his leg threatening to give out, but otherwise ignoring the stabbing pain with each stride.  
  
He swore he heard it one last time as he fled.  
  
“Darling.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is kind of weird and there's only like four lines of dialogue I'm sorry, please don't be too bored.

Waylon Park was a braver man than before.  
  
He would never say he was glad Mount Massive and all its atrocities had happened. Of course not.  
  
But maybe, just a little part of him—the same little part that whispered to him ‘ _maybe I was meant to be there_ ’—felt that he could actually fix everything now and the changes the asylum had wrought in him were not entirely unrelated to that conviction.  
  
He was able to push that upload button, even as he was not able to save the man in the Engine—he knew his name, sometimes saw it carved against the back of his retinas when he blinked but he did not dare bring that name out of that life.  
  
Waylon and Lisa patched things up. In hindsight their feuding had seen somehow ridiculous. Tiptoeing through bodies and slogging through filth, he hadn’t been able to remember what even had made the counseling and the apologizing so hard. He returned to that bed and to her arms. He kissed away her tears and anxieties, assured her that he wouldn’t let anything come between them again. Escaping the clutches of a dirty corporation and a prison full of madmen could instill that sort of confidence.  
  
He taught his youngest son how to ride a bike for the first time. He packed their lunches and kissed the top of their heads when they ran off to catch the school bus. He grinned sheepishly when Lisa affectionately called him her little homemaker when she came home to a table set for dinner.

He feels like he has a new lease on life, he feels like the father and husband he always wanted to be.  
  
Fall faded into winter and winter faded into early spring.  
  
Cowering under a desk in the boys' rooms on a Tuesday evening, the power flickering out from a downed tree, he realized how absolutely stupid, how absolutely _wrong_ he had been.  
  
How could he have ever thought that Mount Massive Asylum could do anything except poison everything it touches?  
  
Everything goes to shit soon after.

He had managed to fool himself for long enough, Lisa had even said she was amazed at his complete recovery post-Mount Massive, but it wasn’t that at all. He had just pushed the poison down, covered it with a sense of normalcy and when that seal finally burst, everything came bubbling out.  
  
The fights start again. Hushed whispers to protect the boys turn to shouting and crying. He is back on the couch—would be even if him and Lisa were getting along perfectly—because he hardly sleeps and when he does he wakes up thrashing. He almost stops eating entirely, only barely able to suffer through vegetarian plates because even the briefest whiff of meat cooking reminds him of limbs sticking out of pots, bodies hung on meat hooks. Sometimes, when Lisa and him manage to reconcile, she presses her mouth to his and he feels like this is fine, but when she trails her fingers downwards, he is struck with the image of a knife held delicately in her hand and he can’t stay erect.

He knows it scares her, imagination whirring away with possibilities as he just takes care of her, but he can’t bring himself to explain. How do you even tell your wife you’re afraid she’ll cut off your dick?  
  
One morning Waylon wakes up to his oldest gently shaking him on the couch, telling him he was having a nightmare, and he can't stop the tears from coming. He hears his voice even as he curls into the couch, eyes squeezed shut and shoulders shaking with sobs.

This wasn’t how it was meant to be. No child should have to take care of their parent.  
  
He didn't want to come back for this.  
  
He didn't want to come back only to fight with Lisa and scare their sons.

She tries to ask him about it, about what he experienced, tells him she thinks that maybe he needs to talk about it. He _tries_. He tries and he talks about the Cook and the man he claimed as his, voice breaking into something akin to laughter as he describes being splattered with brain matter from an exploded head. Lisa is scared and he stops trying to tell her anything. It’s not really funny, he feels sorry for the guy who had the bad luck to cross paths with Manera, but there’s something about the situation that seemed so ridiculous, so preposterous that he couldn’t help but see some small sliver of humor to it. He thinks that no one outside of the asylum could possibly understand.

It’s a lonely feeling.   
  
There is an afternoon where he manages to make it to the grocery store, and all breath leaves his lungs because he sees him, he's here—The Groom. He chases him, he's not sure what it means that he's not running in the opposite direction, and catches his upper arm violently.  
  
Whatever words were about to leave his mouth stutter into nothing, because this isn't Gluskin, he doesn't even look all that much like the man, why was he so convinced—  
  
Blue eyes.  
  
"Sorry." His gaze instantly drops apologetically and he returns home without groceries.  
  
In March Lisa has lost her job _again_ and although neither of them say it they both know the reason.  
  
Murkoff.  
  
Waylon closes his eyes and wishes he had ended everything back when he had the chance at Mount Massive.  
  
He tells Lisa as much, the words come spilling out unheeded during an argument and then for the first time in months, she is the one crying while he remains dry-eyed. Her hands—hands he used to steady and press kisses to each knuckle—are balled in his shirt, face pressed into his chest, and she repeats " _you need to do something, you need to do something_ " over and over again as if it's a prayer.  
  
He had already done so much, though.

He had already spent himself back within those godforsaken halls.  
  
He had done so much, _so much_ for a life that he was ruining.  
  
He doesn't know when his old life had slipped beyond all hope of his reach. Maybe it was when he first signed that two-week contract. Maybe it was when he sent that email. Maybe it was his short time under the influence of the Engine and it just took this long to hit him.  
  
Maybe it was when he couldn't save Gluskin or  
  
 _maybe it was when he didn't kill him._  
  
There's not a lot of use lingering on it, Waylon thinks, not when the important part to take away from it all is that his life is fucked.  
  
He doesn't tell Lisa anything when he leaves. He doesn't know if she would be relieved or hurt, and he thinks it's best for both of them if they never find out. He ducks into his boys' room, kisses the top of their heads, and he's gone.  
  
He wonders if this is the ' _something_ ' Lisa wanted him to do.  
  
He knows where to go. He tried to stay away from any news about the fallout from Mount Massive's torture going public, he thought it would be better to leave that life for good but part of him couldn't resist hoarding any information that trickled past the barriers he set up.  
  
When he leaked that video, his name was plastered all over every news outlet and everyone knew that he had been in the asylum, that he had been subjected to the Morphogenic Engine even if it hadn't been for long. He heard that they had cleared out a psychiatric hospital across the state, refitted it to specifically address the effects the engine and the subsequent riot had on the Mount Massive patients.  
  
He remembers the first time he heard that there were survivors, seated across from the man who helped him leak the video, meeting in secret at some out of the way diner he doesn’t even remember the name of. Back at the entrance, standing with only a knife between him and the Groom, it felt as though they were the only two left. The last two vestiges of a corporation's greed. He can't describe his emotion when he finds out there's more, enough to require an entire hospital dedicated to treating them.  
  
Back when he started everything, the program had asked if he'd like to come in and submit himself for psychological evaluation. He declined. He just wanted to be with his family.  
  
Look how much good that did.  
  
He thinks that they'll take him in now. Probably. He doesn't know where he'll go if they won’t.  
  
He can't go back home, he wants Murkoff to leave his family alone. Let those assholes think he’s been kicked out for good, that he doesn’t care about his sons or his wife. It’ll be better for all three of them in the end, even as he worries what they will think and feel.  
  
He leaves the car for Lisa of course—they had to sell the other one half a year back—and finds himself on a series of buses. He sleeps like he hasn't slept in weeks, head pressed against the glass in a relentless cycle of exhaustion knocking him into unconsciousness and the vibrations waking him up before his sleep slipped too deeply. It's probably not sustainable, but it feels nice to catch a few winks without having to dream.  
  
He didn't plan this out well because it's 4 am when he arrives, but the hospital has a night shift at the front desk and they are very surprised to see him.  
  
"Waylon Park?" The receptionist parrots back at him, and there is a moment where he fears he got his own name wrong. They ask for his ID and he checks it himself before handing it over.  
  
There's so much that he could tell them, that he's not sure if he wants to live, that he can't function, but what he tells them is that he's afraid the engine had affected him more than he wanted to believe before.  
  
Part of him hopes that's it, that it's all the engine, that it isn't him. It is a hope he doesn't dare put much stock in.  
  
He wants to believe that he is doing this for his family, for Lisa and his boys, for the good of the patients he helped when he leaked those documents.  
  
He wonders if he is not just doing it for himself.  
  
They give him a temporary room until they can schedule an evaluation of his well-being in the morning and officially admit him for observation.  
  
He hits the cot like a bag of bricks.  


The next day, everyone is so sympathetic that it makes tears burn in his eyes, and he can't tell if they're tears of sheer relief or from some strange sense of betrayal that Lisa was not able to look at him with such understanding. He knows the latter would be unfair, she was in no way a health care professional, and rationally he knew that.

The hospital doesn't refuse him the way some part of him feared it would even as he also knew that their purpose here was addressing how the morphogenic engine and the totality of Mount Massive effected the patients, and both applied to him in some way.  
  
He didn’t suffer under Murkoff to the same extent that most of the other's here suffered, but there was still some commonality.  
  
He's not sure how that made him feel, that he felt a deeper kinship with the people who had him running for his life than the woman he was married to. Maybe he should talk to someone about it.  
  
Or maybe it would be in his best interest to shut up about all that.  
  
He was voluntarily submitting himself as Waylon Park, whistleblower of the Murkoff Corporation and that came with some advantages. He could leave whenever he wanted to—the last thing he wanted to do was be trapped in another asylum—  
  
Psychiatric hospital.  
  
It was better if he thought of it in those terms.  
  
He wanted help, but the last thing he wanted was for the administrators to deem him dangerous to himself or others and turn that voluntary admission into an involuntary one. He doesn't think he could survive that again.  
  
He wonders how he expects to get help when he can't shake this mistrust of medical personnel. He wonders what he was even thinking coming here.  
  
He closes his eyes and tries to remember his reasons, tries to remember that he has nowhere else left to turn.  
  
He feels twelve years old when an administrator asks if he wants her to call his wife to inform her of Waylon's commitment into the program. He nods, and tries not to think of how she will feel, being informed once again by some stranger that her husband won't be coming home.  
  
He would've liked to have thought he wasn't the type of person that would do that to her again.  
  
If he was desperate, he would've liked to have thought of himself as someone who would at least feel bad about it.  
  
All he feels is numb.  
  
He's learning more and more that he's not the type of person he'd like to be. Maybe he never was, but he feels like he at least used to be a hell of a lot closer.  
  
He asks not to see the other patients here, if that is at all possible.  
  
She asks if he fears them, even with their proper treatment and security protocols in place.  
  
He says yes, but what he's really afraid of is that he won’t be scared of them.  
  
He pitied them, yes, which fueled his decision to leak the video to the public even as his hatred for the Murkoff corporation drove him forward, but he still wants to be afraid, he wants to not understand what they did and why they did it.  
  
Sadly, the world doesn't thrive merely on what one wants.  
  
He attends therapy and answers their questions about the engine. They seem happy to hear that he doesn't see those swirling patterns in his waking hours, but rather only in his dreams and when he wakes up, rubbing his eyes raw in an attempt to scrub away the afterimage burned into his retinas. His eyes are red-rimmed and it embarrasses him when he looks into mirrors and sees himself looking so vulnerable, as if he had just bawled his eyes out.  
  
It's not the only reason he avoids mirrors. His cheeks hollow under cheekbones, his pallor undeniable under the harsh blue-white of the lights in his rest room. He wonders how long he's been like this. He can't seem to remember if Lisa fretted over his weight, the color drained from his face, the scars marked over his body, evidence of that hell, proof that it was real. He needs that sometimes, catches himself thumbing a raised line on his forearm from a buzz saw because sometimes he doubts.  
  
They test his reflexes, they move lights in his periphery and ask him to raise his hand when he can see it, they put ink blots in front of him and he tells them which ones make the morphogenic engine hum at the back of his mind.  
  
Sometimes they just ask him questions. If he misses his family, if he is sleeping any better now that he's been prescribed pills that help numb his nightmares, if he wants to go back to being a software engineer someday.  
  
He waits for them to ask about the video tape, about the asylum itself. Sometimes, when his paranoia builds, he waits for them to ask about Jeremy Blaire, who was found dead in the lobby and even though he wasn't recording when it happened, they _must have known_.  
  
They must have known his association with the Groom, someone must be formulating charges of conspiracy to commit murder against him. At the time it had felt like survival, now it feels like manipulation, as if he had purposely led his Groom there to protect him, to strike down everyone who had or could hurt him.  
  
He used to check the recording to assure himself of his innocence, listen to the fear in his labored breaths in the Groom's lair, the surprised huff before the camera clicked off when he found Blaire. He would watch it and he would be assured of the truth of it. He feared the Groom, he had no control over him. He didn't know Blaire would be there, he did not set out to kill him.  
  
But the therapists advise him to not revisit the tapes and he listens to their professional opinion for now. Instead he slides fingertips along a faded line on the back of his head until the paranoia passes.  
  
It is an afternoon and he has lost count of the days and he is dragging fingernails across that scar when the question slips out. "Did they ever catch the Groom?"  
  
"Excuse me?" His therapist seems surprised, and Waylon realizes she should be—she had been talking about the results of his latest physical when he last zoned out, it was hardly a question with context.  
  
"Eddie Gluskin," he gives his actual name, not the title he had received during the asylum breakdown, as if that will help guide the conversation. "Was he ever found afterwards?" Most days he tries not to dwell on his memorization of that name when he forgot ninety percent of his classmates' at his last high school reunion.  
  
He never looked him up after his return to Lisa. He never even looked up the full extent of his crimes, the Groom he encountered and the patient he failed to rescue was all he needed to know about Gluskin. Part of it was out of a desire to leave all that behind him, and part of it was out of fear of where his imagination might lead him if he found out the Groom was still at large—the Groom leaning over his prone form, tied up in the bed he once shared with his wife, those scarred lips murmuring reassurances against his forehead as a knife glints against his pelvis.  
  
Ignorance was bliss.  
  
But there was nothing Gluskin could do to him here, so he finally asked, even if it meant the staff would gossip about his curiosity. The Groom's lair had gaps in the footage, the outcome of losing consciousness and being tied up, but enough had remained to shock and disgust the masses. When he had leaked that footage, he had to leak all of it, even if the Groom's lair had seemed somehow more private to him than the rest. He didn't know what that meant.  
  
Waylon grew impatient as his therapist worked her lips together, apparently still puzzled over his line of questioning even with his clarification. It couldn't be that hard to understand what he was asking unless—  
  
"He was recovered inside Mount Massive with the majority of the patients."  
  
Waylon didn't know what he expected, but it was definitely not that. He feels his throat tighten.  
  
"Is there something wrong, Waylon?"  
  
His surprise must be obvious, but he can't reign it in.  
  
"Were you expecting something else?"  
  
 _Yes_.

"No."  
  
A breath.  
  
"I just thought maybe he... Would've escaped." He doesn't know, he can’t know what this means to him. "He seemed crafty, so..." It's weak, it's such a weak lie but she doesn't press.  
  
He should segue into something else, deflect from his interest in Gluskin but he can't help it, he has to ask one last question. "Is he here?"  
  
His therapist seems to consider her options. He was probably an easier patient to deal with—he was here of his own volition, he never caused trouble, the worst thing he did was zone out every once in a while—but she still held herself carefully around him. It usually felt nice, that she was careful with him even when he seemed as okay as he could possibly manage these days, but right now he just wanted to know.  
  
He tries not to strain forward in anticipation when she speaks.  "Gluskin is a patient here, yes." Every syllable is said with concern and consideration. He bristles. "But there are security protocols in place to ensure that you will never have to see him. You do not need to worry about encountering him in your time here."  
  
Relief washes over Waylon, and he wishes that was all her words brought, but underneath it all is a unmistakable sense of loss, and his stomach churns with it.  
  
His therapist mistakes the color draining from his face for fear due to his proximity to Gluskin, and he lets her as he is excused back to his room.  
  
He doesn’t think he’s read—doesn’t know if he will ever be—to speak the realization rattling around his mind: that he wants to see Gluskin and is absolutely terrified by it.  
  
He actually starts counting the days again, and it is a Thursday when he is being escorted to the physician. He swears he just had a physical not long ago, but then again he is the guy who finally just starting tracking the date again. He gets along well enough with the staff, and the newly hired guard currently serving as his escort is no exception. The guard is not intended to reign him in, as far as he knows he isn’t seen as a flight risk here, but rather is more ceremonial than anything, an adherence to the rules of the hospital.  
  
He is listening to the new hire—Ben, his name tag reads—almost nostalgically as he chatters away about saving for an engagement ring, practically on autopilot as he waits by the front desk and Ben disappears into the back to grab the attending physician, the nurse apparently on lunch break.  
  
His legs are stiff from a lack of exercise and he turns to lean a hip against the wall when his gaze meets blue eyes.  
  
Sitting in the waiting area, one seat open between him and a guard reading a magazine, and staring straight at him was Eddie Gluskin.


End file.
